Mel Gibson
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Scottish army mooning the English. While filming Conspiracy Theory, he and co-star Julia Roberts played a series of pranks on each other, beginning with Gibson welcoming Roberts to the set with a gift-wrapped freeze-dried rat. In addition to inserting several homages to the Three Stooges in his Lethal Weapon movies, Gibson produced a 2000 television movie about the comedy group which starred Michael Chiklis as Curley Howard. As a gag, Gibson inserted a single subliminal frame of himself smoking a cigarette into the 2005 teaser trailer of Apocalypto.
Alcohol abuse
Mel Gibson has said that he started drinking at the age of thirteen. In a 2002 interview about his time at NIDA, Gibson said, "I had really good highs but some very low lows. I found out recently I'm manic depressive." Gibson has not made
any other public mention of having bipolar disorder.
Gibson was arrested in Toronto in 1984 for driving with a blood alcohol level between 0.12%-0.13% after he rear-ended a car. Gibson pled guilty and was fined $300 and banned from driving in Ontario for 3 months. This led to a retreat to his Australian farm for over a year to recover, but he continued to struggle with drinking. Despite this problem, Gibson gained a reputation in Hollywood for professionalism and punctuality, so that Lethal Weapon 2 director Richard Donner was shocked when Gibson confided that he was drinking five pints of beer for breakfast. Reflecting in 2003 and 2004, Gibson said that despair in his mid-30s led him to contemplate suicide, and he meditated on Christ's Passion to heal his wounds. He took more time off acting in 1991 and sought professional help. That year, Gibson's attorneys were unsuccessful at blocking the Sunday Mirror from publishing what Gibson shared at AA meetings. In 1992, Gibson provided financial support to Hollywood's Recovery Center, saying, "Alcoholism is something that runs in my family. It's something that's close to me. People do come back from it, and it's a miracle."
On July 28, 2006, Gibson was arrested for DUI while speeding in his vehicle with an open container of alcohol. He admitted to making anti-Semitic remarks during his arrest and apologized for his "despicable" behavior, saying the comments were "blurted out in a moment of insanity" and asked to meet with Jewish leaders to help him "discern the appropriate path for healing." When pressed for what his thoughts were at the time in a